Kids Bedroom

In a narrow room inside one of the Ogurawa settlement's company housing blocks, a Slam Dunk manga poster leans against the wall. Beside it, a length of indigo-patterned fabric, folded, rests at the base of darkened timber panelling. Grey carpet runs across the floor. Frosted glass windows filter what light reaches the room into something flat and even. Debris is scattered across the carpet but the room is otherwise intact, the objects arranged almost as if someone set them down and intended to return. The Ogurawa settlement was built in the upper Nakatsugawa valley in Saitama Prefecture by the Nichitsu Mining Co. Ltd. as a company town for the workers of Chichibu Mine. By the 1960s the settlement held enough residents to sustain its own school, clinic, bathhouse, post office, cultural hall and general stores. The settlement's school, Ogurawa Elementary and Middle School, had an enrolment of 274 students in 1959. Chichibu Mine's primary product through its peak decades was zinc and magnetite. When metal extraction ceased in 1978, families began leaving. The enrolment figures at the school record the contraction: 160 students in 1972, 85 in 1973, 46 in 1974, 25 in 1975, and 7 in the final cohort before the school closed in March 1984. The last permanent resident of the Ogurawa settlement departed in September 2006. By the time this photograph was made in 2016, the bedroom had stood empty for a decade. The manga poster and fabric are the kind of objects that do not make it into the last load. They are light enough to carry but easy enough to leave. What remains in the frame is a child's room in a mining settlement that no longer exists as a community, in a valley that the company built and the company outlasted. Chichibu Mine continued limestone extraction until 30 September 2022, when operations closed after more than 400 years of intermittent mining in the area. The residential settlement it supported had been gone for sixteen years by then.